The Jonah Watch

Chapter 5

A set of dungarees ask a good number of washings to make them comfortable. Splotches of red lead, paint, tar, bloodstains from cracked knuckles, frays, patched tears from mistakes with tools, scuffs from loading stores, oil spots on bell bottoms, and a seat worn smooth while the man is pulling an oar in the small boat—introduce a set of dungarees to these influences, add rust that works into the weave to grate and loosen cotton fibers, and the most ironclad outfit works into a liveable, seagoing rig.

By August Brace’s dungarees were beginning to fade while Adrian became brighter. Coiled heaving lines dangled monkey fists from straightened and painted rails. The davits stood like large, inverted hooks with a new small boat, lapstraked and white, snagged between them as rigidly fixed as the sacred cod. Hot updrafts blasted through the fiddley grates as the engines went on the line, rumbling, rough, then smoothing from their godlike belches into a civilized mutter of controlled power, as the engineman, and electrician Wysczknowski, adjusted and puttered and persuaded in low tones. The regulated flow of fuel and lube oil and cooling water spoke in the gush of the overboard discharge, and the black gang appeared abovedecks in the shocking sunlight like old monks from cells after prayer and fasting.

“…B-race…”

“Get crackin’, get crackin’.”

Brass ports gleamed and glowed and smouldered like fixed halos, showing here and there a white streak of unwiped polish. Bronze nozzles, straight-stream and fog, were shadowed in the sun between the bleached white layers of new firehose packed above smooth, gray-painted decks where blisters and bubbles of rust, scraped away, would not bleed hints of mortality until December. The rust lay waiting in its coffers, as imminent as ice, immoral as a government.

“Follow through. Follow through. Follow through, you—cow milker.”

On the pier Brace heaved the line, the arc high and slanting at upright orange life ring targets staggered to a distance of a hundred feet. The targets were like small, round mouths of scorn. Brace heaved the line for a full working day.

“I got no wrists left.”

“Nor ever will,” Glass told him, “as long as you keep turnin’ em.”

While Howard watched, Dane nagged and chafed and sent the wrestler-shaped, Indian-blooded third class bosun Conally to stand behind Brace like a vulture.

“Like boxing,” Conally told Brace. “Start from your toes, not your knees.” Conally heaved a line into the mouth of the far target. “Lay your coil smooth—smooth.” He turned his back to the targets and flipped the line over his shoulder to strike the center of the nearest one.

“It’s a circus act,” Brace said.

“He stinks,” Conally told Dane.

“Clean him up.”

“No liberty,” Conally told Brace. “Until you can heave the line.”

“That’s restriction. You got no authority to do that.”

“See our man on the bridge. See Levere. Take your lawyer with you.”

Brace heaved the line. In a week the arc flattened and the monkey fist was hitting the sides of the rings. Half the throws were getting through.

“Another week,” Conally told Dane.

“Is he tryin’?”

“He’s tryin’.”

“Give him a little run ashore.”

“Go do whatever you do,” Conally told Brace. “Don’t bump your arm.”

Brace went ashore, returned sober, to heave the line.

“I ain’t the only guy on this deck gang,” Brace complained to Howard.

Howard laid a coil and snaked the line toward the far target. The monkey fist hit two feet short and bounced against the target base. Howard laid a second coil and snaked the line through the target.

“It don’t pay to forget.”

“You hit it the second time,” Brace said.

“From solid decks. This pier’s not moving.” Howard laid another coil and began to practice. Radioman James, looking meager and remote and pale, with nearly whitened hair and washed gray eyes, was passing from the Base back to the ship. He stopped, watched, silently picked up a line. He made a throw, bounced the line from the edge of a target, turned to Brace. “Your coil’s got no spring. Lay it like this…”

“Don’t teach him nothing fancy,” Howard said. “Let him learn the plain way first.”

If, from New Bedford, the lousy cutter Able could not tow the plug from a bathtub, that was all the more reason why deck seamen aboard Adrian and Abner learned to stand backup to a fireman’s steaming watch. Firemen learned the helm, and how to make ready the decks to get underway. Yeoman Howard was third quartermaster, while senior quartermaster Chappel could type. Gunner’s mate Majors, less than blessed to belong to a crew that could not, with the three-inch-fifty gun, hit the broad side of a continent at five hundred yards, acted as third bosun to Dane and Conally. Equipment was hard to come by. A less awful tradition said, “Patch it up and make it do,” but even a frugal Treasury Department was generous in the matter of towline.

It came aboard in the first week of August. A new, enormous coil, spiky with small fibers poking through the lay like the remaining bristles on a balding brush. The line was stiff, hard, dry, waxy, unsalted, unbleached, unstained with rust, unmarked by chafing gear, and perhaps, even to Brace, it was beautiful.

Lamp appeared on the fantail like a priest investing a new house or enterprise. He tsked and worried, sat in the sun like a great, sweating slab of ham. The huge bundle was broken and the line laid the length of the port main deck, around the house, down the starboard side, and back up to port. Seamen walked the line, hand-rolling away fistlike loops, sweating and grunting, backs strained against the weight.

“The luck is turnin’, boys.”

“Which-a-way, cook, which-a-way?”

“Don’t scorn luck, boys.”

“Which way, cook?” Levere, hawk-faced, French-faced, and taciturn as a Scot, appeared on the boat deck to watch the investiture.

“How easy it works,” Lamp exclaimed. “It’s stiff but willin’, cap.”

“It’s just well packed.”

“Don’t scorn luck, Cap.”

“Nobody does,” Levere told him. “You ought to give a good deal of thought to that, cook.”

Howard, watching from the pier, his badge of office the immaculate white hat rolled and bleached over dark, brief waves of hair, stood beside the short, bear-shaped second engineman, Fallon, who had a reputation for smart hands; an instinct for machinery that Lamp could somehow explain by talking of Peter the Great. Fallon conversed with pumps, complained to sweat joints, held arterial arguments with webs of piping. He stood like a keg, parting the light breeze that blew down the pier between Adrian and Abner—heavy-browed, round-faced, and with grease-stained hands—perturbed to hear the unnatural squawk of gulls and the alien-whispering wind.

“We got orders for Jensen’s replacement,” Howard told him. “From cutter Aaron. A chief engineman name of Snow.”

“He won’t beat Jensen, chum. What kinda foolish name is Snow?”

“An easy-to-spell name,” Howard told him. “You on top of it down there?”

“We just waitin’ to get reported on the line.”

“Snow shows up next week.”

“We’ll wait,” Fallon said. “Belowdecks is clean. Be a shame to mess it up by usin’ it.” He sniffed suspiciously at the breeze, like a man divining for oil while suspecting he will strike water. “If we got a week, let’s spend it. I want that new kid broken in.”

“I’ll mention it to Dane.”

“Snow? What’s his first name?”

“Edward.”

“A Limey. We went for years without a chief in that engine room—an’ without a Limey, neither.”

“He’ll spend his time in the wardroom.”

“Not a chance,” Fallon said morosely. “We waited this long. You can just bet your uppers that Levere has found hisself a hotrock.”

Across the pier, the crew of Abner did its devotions before a new bundle of line. Seamen walked loops, snipes came blinking from below, or from the messdeck. Some of the men carried coffee mugs. They gabbled, slurped, chewed on sandwiches. The bridge gang clustered on the boat deck like a makeshift choir at a Sunday school picnic, a choir ambiguous in the face of hot dogs, pie, and amazing grace.

“It starts again,” said Fallon.

“Abner takes the duty Monday,” Howard told him. “Us, we still got a little over a week.”

Howard spoke to Dane, who spoke to Fallon, who passed the word to Brace. When Brace understood that he was ordered to stand cold-iron watch and take instruction on steaming, he went to Dane, complaining bitterly, his mouth running hot with adolescent vigor. He was shocked to find his words probing beneath Dane’s professional cussedness, to enter the true cussedness of a land where no grown man would ever want to visit.

Dane, squat, froglike, less gracious than a crocodile, his thin lips as tight with anger as his shape was tight with rheumatism, shoved Brace into the ship’s office.

“I don’t want to see this punk for a week,” Dane told Howard. “Full duty below. Watchstanding and bilges. Lots of bilges.”

Brace stood, like a man immersed in memory. He murmured.

“What?”

“I got rights.”

“You got hoof-and-mouth disease,” Howard told him kindly. “Your big hoof in your fat mouth. I keep telling you.”

“Restriction,” Dane said. “If I catch him ashore, I’ll gut him.”

“You’ve been having a wonderful summer aboard,” Howard said when Dane was gone. “You’re going to love the bilges.”

Brace stood protesting that a seaman was not a fireman, that black was not white, and that people couldn’t just go changing things. Howard said that this was not Illinois; Brace said, what did that mean; and Howard understanding on some inarticulate level that the youthful Brace was perfervidly asking for order in both the visible and invisible universes, said that as soon as Brace learned that he was a crew member of Adrian, and not just a prima donna ex-cow milker striking for seaman, then the happier all of them would be.

Brace went to the engine room, to the sweet, slightly rotten and clammy odor of the bilges where red lead never completely dried, to the sure and perfectly cutting scent of ozone rising hot in the nose, to air layered with the thin and oily taste of diesel, and the smartly grabbing stench of wet valve packing. His thin nose wrinkled, but he discovered that belowdecks he was never bothered by Dane. Brace was loading a cargo of auxiliary information. The engine spaces were in good order. The enginemen could afford to go easy.

“I like it down there,” Brace confided to the sweating and bustling Lamp. “They got a different attitude.”

“Because of Jensen. He was good.” In anticipation of Adrian’s return to duty, Lamp was heavy shouldered about the galley, mixing meringue, as though a special treat of lemon pie was a ritual end to summer.

“Snipes is always late getting the word,” Glass said in passing.

“You are a bad man,” Lamp groaned. “Bad.”

“Jensen made a mistake,” Howard said from his position by the coffee urn. “And Glass, you just now almost made one.”

“Be careful with your mouth,” Lamp said. “I feel it, boys. The luck is skiddy.”

Things (as if they were endorsing Lamp’s bleak guess) began to disappear. The key to an ammunition locker checked out missing, to be found two days later by gunner Majors in a pocket he had delved into a dozen times. Majors ran his inventory and it was intact. Amon, always precise, could not locate twenty pounds of coffee; to find it, after chattering bursts of frenzy, nestled for no scrutable reason in a locker in the wardroom. Howard searched desperately for a lost requisition which, the following week, appeared like a flick of sorcery between unused pages of the ship’s log.

In later years while cooking at the Base, Lamp would vow that nothing had been exactly unusual, nothing exactly wrong. There had been only the feeling that gravity had slipped and time was laughing. Events, normal enough when isolated, had piled up, jumbled and tumbled together, swept back and forth like a lost net washed onto a rocky, pooling beach.

As Lamp revealed that Pluto was conjuncting in some dismal way with Venus and the local newspaper spoke of sunspots—while reporting that the nation’s president had lost another golf ball in a sand trap—Brace received a “Dear John” letter from a teenager named Mona. Glass gossiped to Howard that while on midwatch he saw Brace walk silently to the rail and drop a flat object which plunked into the dark water.

A piece of waste materialized in a rebuilt check valve. There was a revolution in Chile. Engineman-designate Racca, with luck as bad as his bad mouth, and ashore with a deep thirst, encountered a young person named Peak’s Island Sally and a subsequent dose of penicillin, both for the very first time.

“Boys, boys. Boys, boys.”

Chief engineman Edward Snow reported aboard a day early to the consternation of a black gang still smarting with a plugged valve; the same day that Brace left the engine room, and the day when the phone on-shore connection failed for two hours, only to be discovered when a messenger arrived from the Base with a testy TWX message from First District saying that Operations was trying to make a routine call to Levere.

“Skiddy, boys. I be double-dog-damn if it’s good nor bad. Just backwards.”

The ordinarily smart-moving Indian Conally sprained an ankle and hobbled in tape like a wounded racehorse. An admiring senator spoke of proud traditions and of cutting the service’s budget. The commandant sent an all-units memorandum to express the hope that each man would do his best; and cutter Abner, showing its stern, steamed toward a mess that would soon work out to be one of the biggest flukes in the history of line breaking.